


safe in your sound

by Lire_Casander



Series: tryna find any truth in between the lies (the Roswell New Mexico Week 2019) [3]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Language, M/M, Roswell New Mexico Week 2019, mentions of past physical abuse, rnmweek19, roswellweek19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-10 14:08:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19906954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lire_Casander/pseuds/Lire_Casander
Summary: the day bleeds into nightfall and you’re not here to get me through it all





	safe in your sound

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary from _Someone You Loved_ by Lewis Capaldi. It belongs to the _**tryna find any truth in between the lies (the Roswell New Mexico Week 2019)**_ series, whose title also belongs to a song by Lewis Capaldi, _Something Borrowed_. 
> 
> This is written for the [Roswell New Mexico Week](https://roswellnewmexicoweek.tumblr.com/post/184757488673/welcome-to-roswell-new-mexico-week-2019-each-day) over at tumblr, **_Day 3: Quick and dirty_**. I know it doesn't actually fit the prompt that well, but I still wanted to share this.
> 
> Anything you recognize is not mine, although any and every mistake is my own. Beta-read by the amazing [estel_willow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/estel_willow).

Thunder makes the Airstream tremble under the sheer force of the storm pouring down onto Roswell. Michael lies on top of the cot, eyes closed as his good hand rakes through his curls, his left settled on his stomach. He’s shivering with the trailer, soul wrecked as he allows the tears stinging in his eyes to roll down his cheeks.

He hasn’t even had a chance to properly say goodbye. Sure, he’s shouted it out of spite, of course, he’s panted it against sweaty skin, but he was never ready to say goodbye, and now he will never be able to. Memories flood his mind, right hand tugging at his hair, left hand trailing down until it’s rested just a tiny inch above the waistband of the sweatpants he’ll always deny wearing to bed. It’s not as if anyone’s going to ever see what he wears when he goes to sleep.

It’s not as if anyone cares enough to spend the night. 

There’s one image that sticks in the front of his mind, fogging everything else and forcing him to focus on the particularly poignant moment. He’s seeing Alex, fourteen years old and as naïve as he’d ever be, through the glass of his own eyes, soft and blurred in a way only memories are able to turn images into. Alex, who’s holding a guitar, whose laughter would fill the space of three or four arenas. Those were different times, different them.

The Michael Guerin he was at fourteen doesn’t blend right with the Michael Guerin he’s forced to become during the past decade. There’s an edge of remorse mixing with the pain of helplessness he always feels when he revisits old memories from another life. This isn’t the person he wanted to be at twenty-four – even if he isn’t human. He didn’t want to be a jaded version of the Michael Guerin who would have gone to college, the jarred mistake Alex Manes would have never had to make. But here he is, in a trailer he’s still paying off by working for Sanders, not an ounce closer to getting back home than he was when he was eighteen, and as alone as he deserves. 

The storms wails, and the Airstream rocks under the rain. Michael whines lowly, voice shadowed by the thunder and the lightning. His hands itch to reach for the newspaper Isobel has unceremoniously thrown his way earlier in the day, when the sun was still out and he wasn’t thinking about better days. He never thought someone could die from heartbreak, because hearts don’t actually _break_ , but it really feels like his is about to leap out of his chest and run off to the wild unknown searching for a beacon. He feels like passing out and hyper-aware all at once, energy pumping through his veins as his brain short circuits around the fact that the time Alex closed the door behind him after that last argument is the last time Michael will ever see him. 

Michael sighs, the memory still fresh and salty in his mind, Alex screaming at him that heʼd never going to come back to Roswell, that Michael doesn’t understand – _canʼt_ understand – the grief that Alex feels whenever he looks at the mess of mangled bones and scarred skin that is Michaelʼs hand. 

“Of course I get it,” Michael had yelled back, flailing his hand in between them, not willing to hide what had become the biggest elephant in the room. “I was there!” 

“Because I let you in!” Alex had cried out in shame. “Youʼd be fine, youʼd have the full range of motion in your hand! You lost quiet because of _me_!” 

“Stop taking the blame for what he did!” Michael had thrown his good hand in the air, ready to give up the fight. “You’re not him!” 

“I am my fatherʼs son!”

“Familyʼs not only blood, Alex,” Michael had said, defeated. “You keep coming back to the Air Force, even when you couldʼve left years ago. Sometimes I think you love the military more than you love me.” 

He had known heʼd made a mistake the moment the words left his mouth. They hadnʼt talked about love, they had _never_ talked about feelings – it had always been just sex. 

“You’re right, Guerin,” Alex had retaliated, ice lacing his words. “I love war more.” 

After that, Alex had walked out the trailer without a glance back at him, leaving Michael with just memories of what they had, to cherish and protect alongside the ones from his childhood with Max and Isobel. He put up walls to keep his heart from being destroyed. 

Such a good job heʼs done, reminding himself of the moans and the sweating and the kisses and the sweet nothings whispered while heʼs on his own at night in the Airstream. He’s been doing fine, and now heʼs stalling, unable to move forward when those printed words are glaring at him from the floor where heʼs tossed the paper in an angry fit. 

The header is clear in his mind; Michael doesn’t need to read it for he’s already learnt it by heart, word by word, each one hammering a nail in his soul. _Local hero Alex Manes thought to be MIA under terrorist attack in Iraq_. Michael knows what that means – he knows how war beats and bends souls and minds, he knows how veterans come back home, he’s read about it. He’s been getting ready for that, when Alex would come back. He just didn’t think Alex would go missing in action, because the thought of losing Alex hadn’t really ever crossed his mind, not once; even during the darkest times, Michael had always hoped Alex would step back into his life, if only to leave him hanging. But at least heʼd be alive; at least Michael would have known that Alex was safe. This uncertainty is going to kill him if the alcohol or the acetone donʼt win this race he has started against his own clock. Michael cries himself to sleep, one hand hovering over his pants, the other bracing himself into a hug, feeling dirty and alone and lonely and all shades of broken – he knows it wasn’t just skin and bones that got wrecked with a hammer in a tool shed where he lost much more than innocence.

Somewhere across the globe, on an aseptic bed in an aseptic hospital room, Alex Manes wakes up in excruciating pain, legless and disoriented, but _alive_.


End file.
